Wednesday, August 13, 2008

How to evade the web ad trackers

All too often adverts you see online are your past come back to haunt you. Advertisers use tracking cookies to capture the web history of users and monitor usage of a particular site. That information is used to serve up adverts most likely to influence you.

But I discovered earlier this week that some advertising companies let you opt out of that tracking. Read on to find out how to free yourself from tracking.

First, though, consider why you may want to. There are two ways of looking at this. Either you believe the advertisers who say well-targetted ads are actually helpful to users, or you think it best that your personal information stay that way.

To stop Google tracking and targetting you, visit this site and click "opt out". You will still see adverts, but they won't be based on your personal web use.

On this page you can opt out of targetted advertising from 17 advertising networks, including Yahoo's. It also shows you which of those services it covers already have a tracking cookie on your machine.

The DoubleClick site includes a handy reminder of which "non-personally identifiable information" they will use even if you do opt out:

"Your browser type, internet service provider, information about the general content of the site or page displayed on your browser and other non-personally identifiable information provided by the site."

The only way to protect yourself may be to set your browser not to reject 3rd-party cookies (find out how here), to prompt you to decline or accept every cookie any site tries to send you, or to regularly delete them. It's surprising hard it is to keep your web use to yourself.

The opt outs linked to above may be a good thing. But as pointed out at TechCrunch, these firms are not offering anyone the choice to opt into their tracking and targetting systems.

US politicians have said in the past that the law should restrict and regulate online tracking like this. Could the appearance of opt outs be an attempt to head off that threat? Whether it is or not, I expect the number of people that use them to be small. Let us know whether you chose to opt out or not, and your reason for doing so.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Website will guess your gender

Web browsers are happy to share your browsing history with all and sundry. The page uses data about the sex ratio of visitors to popular websites from this source to make a guess. My results are below:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%

Pretty clear-cut. I think it's the dominance of tech- and science-centric sites that tend to have male-dominated audiences.

This script exploits the way that links you have already clicked on appear in a different colour to unclicked links. It presents your browser with a bunch of links and checks what colour it makes them to find out where you've been.

One open question has been the strength of the connection between our online relationships and our online interests and buying behaviour. But new work by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington suggests the investors may be right, and that the two match up nicely.

Tracking more than 10 million MSN Messenger users showed that the more people chat to each other, the more likely they are to use the same search terms. This may sound obvious, but it hadn't been shown before. Think of the implications:

Even if you're a privacy-conscious user who keeps your personal information close to your chest, search providers can tap the details of your chat buddies to predict your searches. Targeted advertising could be created based on their interests as well as your own.

The correlation even extends to 'friend-of-a-friend' connections. Your search terms are also likely to be similar to people you don't talk to, if you have a friend in common.

This may explain one reason for Google's late appearance on the instant messaging scene with Google Talk, which confused some commentators at the time.

It certainly gives fresh marketing ammunition to Microsoft, whose heavily integrated Live platform includes searching and the popular Windows Live Messenger.

I shudder to think that my friends' interests could be used to pitch me ads, and I'm sure they would feel the same. Not for privacy reasons - I use Google's webmail so am used to targeted ads. It's because everyone has their individual, strange interests that they don't hold in common with their friends. I don't want my friends' freaky obsessions, whether they be Linux or Doctor Who, influencing my search results. Some things should just be kept to yourself.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Is your ISP spying on you?

Is your internet service provider (ISP) spying on you? Experts say there is no sure-fire way of knowing, but several technologically savvy subscribers have caught their ISPs in the act. It's an issue I investigate in a news feature in this week's magazine.

A couple of months ago, few people would have worried about ISPs eavesdropping on their internet use. But providers across North America, Asia and Europe are now known to be collecting information about their subscribers' browsing habits. With the help of firms like Phorm, the ISPs sell that information to advertisers, who use it to target their products to people with appropriate interests. Someone that had previously visited holiday sites, for example, might be shown adverts for cheap flights.

Many subscribers are not bothered by this. Phorm and others do not collect information that can be used to link individuals to specific websites, for example. But some users do not like the idea of someone keeping tabs on their surfing. They face a problem, because ISPs often start collecting information without telling their subscribers.

Fortunately, some users have the technical know-how to catch their providers out. Last summer, for example, a subscriber realised that his browser was connecting with a website he did not recognise. With hindsight, it appears that his ISP - BT - had been trialling Phorm's technology at the time. Another user realised that his provider had teamed up with a different advertising firm, Adzilla, based in Brisbane, California, by examining the traffic passing through his website.

So the odds are still stacked in ISPs favour. It is easy for them to try out new ways of monitoring their customers, and new ways of using that information without anyone knowing how their personal web history is being used.

A few savvy users have helped reveal what is happening. But new ways of checking up on ISPs are still needed.

Do any New Scientist readers know of other ways of doing that? If you have any suggestions, contact us via this form. If we learn of any useful tricks, we?ll publish the details.

Monday, October 29, 2007

How to stay anonymous

In today's age of near blanket technological surveillance, how far would a person need to go to remain truly anonymous?

This article in yesterday's Observer gives you some idea, describing 10 steps to help evade unwanted attention from government agencies and big businesses.

They range from simple measures like wearing a hood each time you encounter CCTV cameras, using software that keeps you anonymous online and swapping supermarket loyalty cards with friends, to more extreme measures like travelling to an unfamiliar city and paying a homeless person to buy you a cellphone, and even generating your own electricity.

But, even if some of these ideas are a bit radical for your tastes, the article certainly highlights just how ubiquitous surveillance has become without most of us realising it. I think it also shows how, at least in countries like the UK, companies are more of a threat to privacy than the government.

However, given the extreme measures devices by the author for maintaining your privacy, I was a bit surprised to discover how easily his name address and phone number could be found with a WHOIS look-up.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Tool shows who is fiddling their Wikipedia entry

Wikipedia's policy of letting anyone edit an entry means mistakes can be corrected almost instantly. But how can you trust each anonymous correction to be completely unbiased?

For example, you might remember the scandal caused when aides were found to have altered an entry on Wikipedia to protect the reputation of a Democrat member of Congress. Do other vested interests regularly polish their Wikipedia write-up or completely remove negative information? The answer, it seems, is yes.

A new online tool called Wikipedia Scanner lets you check for yourself. It automatically compares the IP address logged when someone makes an anonymous Wikipedia edit to a public database of IP addresses belonging to all sorts of corporations and government bodies.

CalTech student Virgil Griffith created the tool in an attempt to discover more controversies. So far, his software has revealed some minor wiki-fiddling. For instance, someone at Diebold, a company that makes electronic voting machines, deleted chunks of negative information about its products, although this was quickly corrected by other editors. Another fiddler at Wal-Mart apparently made tweaks to polish the company's image.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Cloak and dagger maths

To laymen like me, mathematicians are a puzzle. What do they do all day?

At our anti-intellectual worst we picture them playing abstract and meaningless games with numbers. More charitably, we might imagine they are exploring the fundamentals of abstract truth, or helping to reveal the nature of reality.

It was during this decade that the increasing importance of electronic communications, and especially the Internet, began to make fast, secure cryptography vitally important. Suddenly, abstruse mathematical problems became vital for safeguarding privacy, commerce - and even national security.

The National Security Agency's fruitless attempts to limit strong cryptography also added an element of spy vs. spy danger to the field as cryptography became an issue of national security, free speech and intellectual freedom.

In his article, Koblitz says cryptography generated refreshing and stimulating ideas and led to a certain loosening of inhibitions among mathematicians. For example, at the annual Crypto conferences in Santa Barbara, California, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie once had to instruct audience members that they were welcome to throw empty beer cans at the speakers - but not full ones.

The downside, he says, was that mathematicians started turning out substandard work as they chased increasingly available cryptography grants. And they weren't above hyping their own pet crypto systems as "provably" secure, when such a thing is impossible.

Koblitz's paper gives a nice feel for those early days of the crypto boom. He also provides some mathematical background to a few interesting cryptographic problems and even settles an old score or two in the process.Kurt Kleiner, New Scientist contributor

The researchers show that the Zune's wireless sharing could let strangers push content onto your player, while the Nike+iPod kit could let others track your location (we've written about that before). Even SlingBox's encryption mode let's others work out what you're watching, the paper suggests.

The point they're keen to make is that, as computing becomes ubiquitous, the potential for personal information to leak out will increase. Hardware needs to be better designed, they say, as right now security is not taken seriously enough.

But is this really a large risk? We already leak a sea of information every year through less high-tech channels, like Will ubiquitous computing really make things that much easier for others to snoop on us?